Gender Equality and the First Amendment: Foreword

Gender equality demands equal opportunity to speak and be heard. Yet, in recent years, the clash between equality and free speech in the context of gender has intensified—in the media, the workplace, college campuses, and the political arena, both online and offline. The internet has given rise to novel First Amendment issues that particularly affect women, such as nonconsensual pornography, online harassment, and online privacy. On November 1–2, 2018, the Fordham Law Review brought together scholars and practicing lawyers from around the nation to address many of the pressing challenges facing feminists and free speech advocates today. The Symposium was a fitting topic to mark the occasion of 100 years of women at Fordham Law School. Over twenty scholars, practitioners, and writers participated in the two-day conference, along with Sylvia A. Law, Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law, Medicine, and Psychiatry Emerita of N.Y.U. School of Law, who delivered the Robert L. Levine Lecture. Conference panels considered campus speech issues, including trigger warnings, safe spaces, and hostile classrooms; pornography, including nonconsensual pornography (or “revenge porn”); being female online and how the internet affects women’s reputations, self-expression, and privacy; words, images, misogyny, and the First Amendment; and how gender representation in the media and politics impact political outcomes and reproductive rights. This issue of the Fordham Law Review includes papers from six of the Symposium participants, in addition to Professor Law’s Levine Lecture

Risky facilities: analysis of crime concentration in high-rise buildings

This paper investigates the security of high rise high density accommodation at the Gold Coast – a premier Australian holiday destination. Surfers Paradise has one of the highest population densities in Australia at 3,279 persons per square kilometre and over 70 percent of the residential population live in buildings classed as high density within a mix of tourist apartments and units. The paper explores how the levels of place management and guardianship relate to the volume and mix of crimes occurring in high-rise apartment buildings. • Foreword: Current town planning and housing policies suggest that in the very near future, housing density in major Australian cities will be much higher than current levels. To date, little attention has been paid to how these policy shifts will impact levels of crime and fear of crime. The aim of this research is to contribute to the development of strategic policy for the secure management of high-density housing. By analysing actual rates and types of crime, guardianship levels, building management styles and perceptions of fear of crime, the research will reveal how planning policies and high-rise building management styles can coalesce to create safer vertical communities. The research focuses on high-rise apartments and touristic buildings on the Gold Coast (specifically Surfers Paradise) and identifies the disproportionate concentration of crimes among a handful of buildings. Results may help state and local governments in Australia to avoid repeating the housing policy mistakes experienced by other countries

The Next Step: The California Cybersecurity Institute’s Anti-Trafficking Virtual Reality Immersion Training

Digital gaming and virtual learning platforms have expanded the boundaries of experiential based anti-trafficking training. Virtual reality provides a technological mechanism for immersive storytelling through the simulation of a physical presence within an artefact using software and specialised hardware. The success of virtual-based immersive training is directly dependent on a series of factors, including realism, re-playability, and supplemental in-person training. This article describes the California Cybersecurity Institute’s anti-trafficking immersion training programme, which advances beyond awareness education to test law enforcement and first responder-specific skills and biases. This multi-layered programme looks to incorporate all concepts of ‘serious gaming’ within law enforcement and humanitarian communication

The Internet Will Not Break: Denying Bad Samaritans Section 230 Immunity

What do a revenge pornographer, gossip-site curator, and platform pairing predators with young people in one-on-one chats have in common? Blanket immunity from liability, thanks to lower courts’ interpretation of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) beyond what the text, context, and purpose support. The CDA was part of a campaign — rather ironically in retrospect — to restrict access to sexually explicit material online. Lawmakers thought they were devising a safe harbor for online providers engaged in self-regulation. The CDA’s origins in the censorship of “offensive” material are inconsistent with outlandishly broad interpretations that have served to immunize from liability platforms dedicated to abuse and or those that deliberately tolerate illegality. In contrast to a strike-oriented view of the CDA’s safe harbor, its modest revision will not break the “Internet.” Whether this would have been true at the time of its passage two decades ago, it would not be true today. Conditioning immunity from liability on reasonable efforts to address unlawful activity would not end innovation or free expression as we know it. The current environment of perfect impunity for platforms deliberately facilitating online abuse is not a win for free speech because harassers speak unhindered while the harassed withdraw from online interactions. With modest adjustments to section 230, either through judicial interpretation or legislation, we can have a robust culture of free speech online without shielding from liability platforms designed to host illegality or who deliberately host illegal content

The Business of Being Good: How it Pays to Be a Humanitarian State

In an era where human rights increasingly take a position of primacy in international relations, certain states have donned the mantle of the humanitarian, prioritizing human rights over nearly every other item on the foreign policy agenda and mainstreaming humanitarianism in other areas of foreign policy. Existing arguments find that states that advance humanitarian policies are coerced, socialized, or mimicking, but they fail to seriously consider that states may choose and benefit from humanitarianism in several ways. We do not focus on explaining or theorizing why states have chosen to engage in humanitarianism; rather, we offer an analysis of the potential benefits of doing so that make it a viable policy choice. Humanitarian national policy certainly strengthens reputation, but that reputation also has the potential to create access to economic and security benefits not available to other states. Additionally, states and state leaders gain domestic political benefits from advancing humanitarian goals. In this paper, we explore the case of Norway and how its position as humanitarian state in the international community has afforded it a leadership position in international relations with the capacity to shun the interests of even the most powerful states in favor of its humanitarian aims

From Acceptable Loss to Unacceptable Harm: How Norm Entrepreneurs Co-opted the Human Rights Discourse (abstract)

Contemporary human rights campaigns have created a shift in the discourse by reframing and co-opting the language surrounding high politics issues such as arms control and human security. The atrocities of the twentieth century led to increased interest in minimizing the costs of war, converging in an international norm privileging the protection of human life. While the dominant discourse in IHL has been geared towards rights of the human, a new approach framing human rights as duties of the state has gained traction resulting in victories for various human rights campaigns. This shift has placed the onus on states to follow particular rules of war to uphold human rights rather than focus on the post hoc consequences of their conduct. This paper explores the invocation of different types of ethical discourses and their impact on the outcomes of human rights campaigns, finding that a discourse with a deontological frame is the easiest to interpret with the lowest cost and is consequently most effective as a campaign tool. By serving as a heuristic for moral behavior this underutilized frame reverses the burden of making moral judgments back onto potential human rights violators and shifts the moral choice prior to any loss of life

Determining the Health Utility of Urinary Incontinence in Women

Objective The goal of this study was to define the utility of urinary incontinence in women using the Standard Gamble, the gold standard method for determining health state utilities, based on a diagnosis obtained from multichannel urodynamic testing, the gold standard in clinical diagnosis. Background Health state utility values are important in many areas of medical research. The values are used in cost-utility analysis, decision analysis and health related quality of life studies. To date, studies that have estimated the utility of urinary incontinence in women have relied on values from generic health related quality of life questionnaires such as the ED-5Q and Health Utilities Index or from expert opinion. The utility of urinary incontinence in these studies appears to be unintuitivelylow, at 0.71 to 0.82, with perfect health represented by 1.0. The utility of health states that are much more debilitating, for example cancer (0.82), is higher than urinary incontinence. These studies have relied on patient self-diagnosis of incontinence. Additionally, they have considered all types of urinary incontinence together. Intuitively, one would think that quality of life would be affected differently with different types (stress, urge, mixed) and differing severity of incontinence. Methods All adult female patients who underwent urodynamic testing at Brigham and Women’s Hospital were prospectively recruited. Diagnosis of type of incontinence was made by attending physician interpretation of the urodynamic study. No exclusion criteria. Patients completed three validated questionnaires: Sandvik Severity Index - A validated two question symptom specific instrument to evaluate urinary incontinence EQ-5D -A five-domain generic quality of life questionnaire. Answers are converted into a utility value. Visual Analog Scale - Vertical line from 0 (worst imaginable health) to 100 (best imaginable health). Patient rates own perception of health on line. The Standard Gamble technique was used in a standard format to determine each patient’s utility value for their health state. Patient is asked to choose between life in current health state and varying risks of immediate painless death. Gold Standard method to determine patients utility preference for their health state. Results This pilot study of 28 patients demonstrated a significant difference in utility value derived from the Standard Gamble and the generic health-related quality of life instruments. There were 21 patients with stress urinary incontinence, 6 patients with urge urinary incontinence and 1 patient with mixed urinary incontinence. Mean Sandvik score was higher in Urge Incontinence subgroup. Mean Utility from Standard Gamble was lower in Urge Incontinence group. Sandvik scores were moderately correlated with EQ-5D, SG and VAS utilities. Conclusions Utility scores derived from Standard Gamble were significantly higher than those derived from generic health related quality of life instruments. Utility scores derived from EQ-5D and VAS were similar tothose previously reported in the literature. Current utility values over-estimate the degree of bother of urinary incontinence. Researchers should consider using higher utility values for urinary incontinence in future cost utility and quality of life studies